People who say that measuring your Twitter followers is a vanity measure are wrong…kind of. If the followers are completely random and not connected to you or each other, then the number of them is almost irrelevant. However, if you can build up a targeted audience, they are a valuable group of individuals waiting to interact with you.

If you want to increase your Twitter followers, here are 10 quick tips to get you started:

1) Reach out:Find people to follow first. There are lots of good directories out there, I particularly like Twellow, but it’s a personal choice

2) Make the first move: Interact with this initial group of accounts that you are following – reply to questions, retweet great content and get involved in the conversation

3) Follow hashtags: Follow hashtags of interest as well as people. It’s a great way of interacting with people who you don’t know yet

4) Keep your topics varied: You should vary your content to make it interesting. Often a mix of your personality, your subject and your industry is more engaging than just one topic

6) Watch the size of your tweet: To enable someone to retweet your message (which will get your post and account seen by that person’s followers), don’t use all 140 characters – leave at least enough space for them to include ‘RT @MyTwitterHandle’

7) Get your frequency right: I find that 5-7 tweets a day is enough, but experiment to find your sweet spot. If you do too little or too much, it turns followers off

8) Be polite: If someone has helped you out by sharing your content, make sure that you say thanks – it takes seconds to do, but it’s a really nice thing to do

9) Use DM wisely: If you want to thank someone, do it publicly. It is tempting to take your thanks onto DM, but why not share the person’s account with your followers –if yor targeting is working, your followers will be interested

10) Persevere: Often it can take some time to get your followers growing, so keep doing good things and you will start to see them grow – don’t get disheartened! Keep doing the right thing and your followers will grow organically.